Politics Journal: The Trio of Female Chief Ministers Storms Delhi

Over the past 10 days, three of India’s most powerful women — the chief ministers of West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh –have travelled to Delhi. Their very presence in the capital highlights that the dynamic of regional and national politics is unlikely ever to be the same again.

Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal, Jayaram Jayalalithaa of Tamil Nadu, and Kumari Mayawati of Uttar Pradesh came to the capital from very different directions, as it were.

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Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, which aims to politicize and empower India’s lowest castes, is at daggers drawn with the Congress party. Jayalalithaa of the All India Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam fought and won the recent state elections against the Congress and its key ally in her state but has nevertheless offered to support the Congress in the national government. Mamata’s Trinamool Congress remains part of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in New Delhi, which has run India since 2004.

Both Jayalalithaa and Mayawati have been chief ministers of their respective states before while Mamata is the first woman chief minister of West Bengal. But what clearly unites them is the common theme of struggle.

Politics was the only avenue that fed their ambition. Two of them nursed the opportunities provided by their early mentors. Mayawati was the chosen heir of Kanshi Ram, the founder of the BSP and Jayalalithaa was the protégé of M.G. Ramachandran, one of Tamil Nadu’s best-known film actors. Mamata doesn’t appear to have had a mentor, which is perhaps why her whimsical behavior often becomes the butt end of jokes by her male colleagues. But all three have broken the dynastic mould that otherwise dominates Indian politics.

The fact that each of these women has been handed huge mandates by the people, winning their parties winning more than three-fourths of the seats in their respective assemblies, gives them a free hand to fulfill their campaign promises. Their authority was a constant theme running through their New Delhi visits.

Jayalalithaa first paid a courtesy call upon Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, demanding funds for her vision for Tamil Nadu, then tore into Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, with whom she has a long-standing political feud.

She accused him of “stealing” his election from Sivaganga parliamentary constituency, from where Mr. Chidambaram was elected to the national Parliament in 2009. Jayalalithaa claimed the election data entry operator in Sivaganga had transferred some of the votes that had been polled by her candidate, Raja Kannappan, to Mr. Chidambaram’s count and called on him to resign.

Rejecting the charge, Mr. Chidambaram said Jayalalithaa has “always had utter contempt for court proceedings, hence her statement is not at all surprising.”

Some observers saw in her attack a determination to establish her political authority back home in Tamil Nadu.

“This is not only about her old rivalry with Chidambaram,” said Sashi Kumar, veteran journalist and chairman of the Chennai-based Asian School of Journalism. “It was about her victorious landing in Delhi, as well as about her anticipated victorious reception when she returned to Chennai.”

Just as Jayalalithaa left Delhi, Mayawati arrived. With state elections scheduled in Uttar Pradesh in the summer of 2012, her comments to the party faithful sounded more like a war cry.

She accused Congress of being the “mother of all corruption” and suggested that funds allegedly siphoned off related to last year’s Commonwealth Games could have been used to help improve the city’s infrastructure.

According to Sudha Pai, a political scientist at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Mayawati’s attack is “not surprising, because as elections draw nearer, there is bound to be increasing hostility between the two parties.”

Corruption has returned to the national agenda, said Ms. Pai, but caste identity politics still gets votes. The BSP and Congress have a similar voter base, a coalition of lower- and upper-caste voters. So when Congress won 21 out of 80 seats in the 2009 parliamentary elections, its best showing in the last two decades, Mayawati’s party began to feel a little threatened.

But Ms. Pai noted that despite its recent success, Congress was “not much of a threat to Mayawati.”

She added: “Rahul Gandhi has the right idea, with his forays into the villages and small town of UP, but the Congress has not been able to rejuvenate itself. There is no fresh blood and the state leadership, despite party elections, consists of the same people.”

In contrast, Mayawati already has her list of candidates for the 2012 elections. She’s hoping the politics of development will also bring in votes. On her birthday in January, she inaugurated an enormous sewage plant for Lucknow with World Bank aid. Previous celebrations had been notable for their multi-tiered cakes, her bright pink clothes and flashing diamonds in her ears.

As for Mamata Banerjee, who arrived in the capital for consultations on a bill to create a national ombudsman to investigate official corruption, there was little of the populist rhetoric that helped catapult her to power in West Bengal last month.

And, notably, she shrugged off questions on whether the prime minister or the chief justice should be covered by the ombudsman – a major point of contention between the government and civil society negotiators who have been haggling for weeks over the bill’s terms.

“It hardly matters,” she told a press conference in Delhi. “Do you think the inclusion of one person will strengthen the fight against corruption?”

Her apparent indifference to Delhi, said Hari Vasudevan, head of the Maulana Azad Institute for Social Sciences in Kolkata, is linked to the fact that she is totally focused on state politics. He pointed out that her visit to the capital came after she fulfilled a key campaign promise to pass into law last week the return of 400 acres of land at Singur which had been forcibly acquired by the previous Left government for a Tata car plant.

“This is the honeymoon period, Mamata Banerjee can do no wrong,” Mr Vasudevan said.

Jyoti Malhotra is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi. She writes for India’s Business Standard daily and for Pakistan’s Express Tribune.

CORRECTION & AMPLIFICATION: Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa is upper middle class – her father was a surgeon — and she attended a convent school in Chennai. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that she, Mamata Banerjee and Kumari Mayawati all hailed from lower middle class families and went to local schools and colleges.

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